Ante Pavelic

Ante Pavelic (14 July 1889-28 December 1959) was the Poglavnik of the Independent State of Croatia from 1941 to 1945 under King Tomislav II of Croatia. He was an ally of Adolf Hitler of Nazi Germany during World War II and fought against the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia's partisans, and was shot in 1957 by Blagoje Jovovic of the Yugoslav Secret Police, dying two years later of wounds.

Biography
Ante Pavelic was born in Bradina, Konjic, in Austria-Hungary (present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina) to a Croatian Roman Catholic family that moved to Herzegovina to work on the Sarajevo-Metkovic Railroad. He grew up attending a Muslim school in the Muslim city of Travnik, and his sense of Croat nationalism began when he heard that townspeople in Lika spoke Croatian and not just the peasants. He became a Croatian nationalist activist, and in 1928 he called for Croats to rebel against the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Pavelic was later exiled to Germany and Italy, and in 1924 the Macedonian revolutionary Vlado Chernozemski killed King Alexander I of Yugoslavia and France's Foreign Minister Louis Barthou in Marseille. Pavelic was sentenced to death in absentia by a French court, and he sought refuge with Italy.

On 10 April 1941 he was made the leader of the Independent State of Croatia under King Tomislav II of Croatia, the Italian prince Aimone of Savoy-Aosta. His puppet government was allied with Nazi Germany, who set him up as ruler after taking over the Balkans. He persecuted Serbs, Jews, and Romani living within Croatia in what was described as the single most disastrous episode in Yugoslav history. Although he ordered the Croatians to continue fighting the Allied Powers of World War II even after the surrender of Germany in May 1945, Pavelic fled to Austria. He later headed to Italy, Argentina, and Chile. In El Palomar, Buenos Aires, in 1957, he was he was shot by Blagoje Jovovic, a member of the Yugoslav Secret Police who was sent to take revenge for the deaths of many Serbs in Croatia under Pavelic's rule. A bullet was lodged in his spine, and he died at the age of 70 in 1959 in Madrid, Spain of his wounds.